The Sister returned and said brightly, ‘You must come again after his op. I can see you’ve done him good. Time to say goodbye now, Mr …’
I waved and smiled from his doorway. Sammy smiled and tried to wave back. The Sister closed the door. ‘If you care to ring me tomorrow evening I’ll be here on-duty and will be able to tell you how he’s got on after the theatre.’
The next evening she said over the telephone, ‘Yes, we’re all very sorry. Three o’clock this afternoon. Very peaceful. He didn’t suffer.’
Betty was on-duty. I raged round to Ollie’s billets. ‘He didn’t suffer! What about all those weeks? My God, I’ll never train if it means turning into a callous block of ice!’
Ollie was only slightly older than myself, but much more mature. ‘Stop taking everything at face value! She only meant, he didn’t die in agony. She can’t be a callous bitch or she wouldn’t have busted red tape and let you see him. You’re not his next-of-kin, a relative, or fiancée and I’ll bet she spotted your greatcoat in that carrier bag and that he’d told her you’d nursed him. You know damn well hospital etiquette forbids nurses to call on their patients once they’ve been transferred to other wards, and I’ll bet that goes for other hospitals too.’ She handed me a gin and lime. ‘Knock that back and use your loaf. Would you really like to have seen poor old Sammy lingering on and weeping over the biscuits and cheese like Johnny?’
‘No. No!’
Johnny, who was warded in one of our single rooms, was another Battle of Britain casualty. He was in his late twenties. The only one of his former girlfriends who still visited him, occasionally, told me he had looked like a younger Gary Cooper. The face under the white cranial cap was a pink, pinkly seamed, mask. The eyes in that mask were the eyes of a confused child.
He was now able to feed himself. One lunch, after collecting his barely touched soup, then the shepherd’s pie, I took in biscuits and cheese. ‘You haven’t eaten much. Would you like some biscuits and cheese?’
‘Yeah.’ Pause. ‘Like cheese.’
Fifteen minutes later I returned for his tray. He was sitting staring at the tray on the bedtable. The biscuits and cheese were untouched, the former on the side plate, latter in a small dish. ‘Didn’t feel like any after all?’
He looked up and his eyes filled with tears. ‘Yeah. Can’t remember – how to eat ’em?’
‘Shall I show you?’
‘Yeah.’ The tears poured down the pink mask. ‘Want to eat ’em.’
‘You will. Like this.’ I put the cheese on the biscuit plate, cut the lump in tiny pieces, snapped the biscuits, put a bit of cheese on each bit of biscuit. ‘Now, pick up two bits together with your hand and put them in your mouth. Then eat it. That’s right. Then again.’ I dried his eyes. ‘See?’
‘Yeah.’ A very long pause. ‘Thanks.’
I had only told this to the senior relief Sister on that day and to Ollie, as she cleaned his room daily and had grown as fond of him as I had of Sammy. The relief Sister said in view of his gross injuries it was only to be expected but the fact that he had managed to finish the biscuits and cheese by himself was a hopeful sign. Ollie had nearly wept. ‘I’ll bet he was polite! He’s so damned nice!’
‘Didn’t he get a gong for it?’
‘He did!’ She retorted savagely. ‘And isn’t that bloody nice of them?’
I handed her some of her own gin.
In December, Betty and I were moved from the hospital to work in the VAD Mess, there known as the Hostel. Our Commandant called us Home VADs; we called ourselves Hostel Skivvies. In the Hostel we cleaned all the rooms but the kitchen and scullery – the VAD cooks’ prerogative – set, served, cleared, washed-up all the day staff’s meals and night staff’s breakfast and suppers. As the day staff needed breakfast before going on-duty at 7.30 a.m. and supper after coming off at 8 p.m., our working day started at 6.30 a.m. and with luck was finished by 10 p.m. We had the usual three hours off daily, generally in mid-afternoon, and, as we were often reminded, the added bonus of two extra days off when our four weeks ended.
On Christmas Eve, turkeys, sausages, puddings, sacks of potatoes and brussels sprouts jammed kitchen and scullery and gallons of bread sauce simmered on the Aga cookers. That night, as Betty and I were about to return to our billets, we noticed a light still on under the scullery door. In the scullery two junior cooks were struggling to open two huge sacks. ‘Sprouts, and we’ve got to finish ’em now as there’ll be no time in the morning.’ We hung our greatcoats, tin hats and respirators on the empty plate-racks, found knives, buckets, stools and settled down with them. One cook had a good voice. She sang us The Folks That Live On The Hill as a solo, then re-arranged it as a part song. Our Commandant’s head came round the door, ‘You all sound very happy in here, gels!’ When we judged her shut in her own room on the other side of the front hall, I taught the others the words Ollie and I had composed to the tune and refrain of You’ll Be Far Better Off In A Home. (Several weeks later in a staff concert for the patients, Ollie and I, dressed in hospital ‘blues’, sang in duet a somewhat less bawdy version and, for the only time in my life, stopped the show.)
When we finished we made cocoa and sat on the kitchen table to drink it. One of the cooks recalled it was Christmas Day. ‘Happy Christmas, girls! And when the kids ask – and what did you do in the Big War, Mummy? And you say – peeled ruddy sprouts till one on Christmas morning – they’ll never ruddy believe you!’
When our four weeks ended, we were granted our first week of ‘privilege’ leave since call-up. Our parents had been back in St Leonards for about two months, we were given free travel warrants and so able to go home for the first time since February. Had we lived in the Hostel and not in billets, almost certainly our warrants would have been cancelled before we could use them. Being billeted, we collected the signed warrants the evening before our leave started on the following morning.
All that intervening night the southern sky was red. Sixty miles away the City of London was burning again. We watched the sky anxiously, set our alarms for five-thirty, by six were cycling furtively for the railway station and praying none of our authorities were yet awake or near telephones. We guessed, rightly, that with daylight all travel warrants that involved journeys to or through London would be cancelled or postponed. ‘Won’t matter which to the Army. It’ll end up forgetting our leave like my four nights off.’
The R.T.O. at the station looked too sleepy to care if our warrants were written in German and signed by Hitler. ‘Yes, there’s a train waiting. Been waiting hours. Don’t ask me when it will get to London, but if it does, ask again about trains to the coast.’ He opened a carriage door, shone his torchlight over sleeping soldiers. ‘Shift up, chaps – there’s good chaps – shift up. In you get, ladies!’ He pushed us in, slammed the door, the sleepers groaned but obligingly moved aside to give us the last two seats.
It was just light and the whole carriage was awake when to our combined relief, our train pulled out. We were all in uniform, on leave, and convinced any minute we would be recalled to our units. During the just-under six-hour, sixty-mile journey, we swopped sandwiches, chocolates, cigarettes, bomb – service-horrors – and life stories, and were equally astounded to find we had reached Charing Cross. ‘Give over! Jerry’s got to be slipping! Why hasn’t he flattened it, eh? He’s had the time! Losing his grip, I reckon.’
The next R.T.O. said someone had told him a few trains might be running down to the Sussex coast from Victoria that evening. ‘Not before 18.00 hours, I gather. Give you time to have a look round. Last night? Oh yes. Jerry put on quite a show. Got the City. Not clear yet how much is still standing, apart from St Paul’s. Didn’t get St Paul’s. Got a small one in through the roof, that’s all. Dome’s intact. Transport? You take my tip, ladies, and footslog it. Get around much quicker.’
A little traffic was moving again in the Strand and up Fleet Street. A great pall of dark smoke still overhung the City and as we walked closer the
acrid air hurt the eyes, nostrils and throat. There were ropes right across the foot of Ludgate Hill and one of the many policemen told us most of the City was roped off. ‘Can we get a little closer to look at St Paul’s, please?’
The police looked at our uniforms, and as we were back in the war, we were back to wearing armour, and passports. The police held up the ropes for us to duck under, and one walked with us. ‘Didn’t get St Paul’s, did he?’ he said.
We walked slowly up Ludgate Hill in the middle of the road. On either side the blackened smouldering shells of buildings belched dark smoke, and down side streets and narrow alleys tongues of yellow flames licked and spat into the thickening, grey air. An army of firemen and A.R.P. rescue squads were still working. ‘Got a right job on here.’ The policeman stopped walking. ‘No nearer, nurses, and can’t hang about long. No telling what’ll come down next and what hasn’t yet gone off.’
In silence we stood and looked up at the great dome of the cathedral built to replace the old St Paul’s destroyed in that other Fire of London. There were other buildings standing, but in those moments Wren’s St Paul’s, smeared and blurred by smoke, surrounded by devastation, seemed the only intact building in the City, and because it was intact seemed of far more than aesthetic importance. Turning away, we said, as, everyone we spoke to said in London that day, ‘Didn’t get St Paul’s, did he?’
Beyond the ropes and just round the corner in Farringdon Street, a WVS mobile canteen was parked. Three middle-aged women were serving mugs of tea and sandwiches to relays of firemen and A.R.P. workers. The men pushed their black tin hats back on their heads whilst they drank, and mopped their blackened faces with engrimed handkerchiefs that left more streaks of dirt than they removed. (In notes made the following day, ‘Those men looked like badly made-up clowns.’) They all moved slowly, heavily, under the weight of fatigue, and one noticed us, and called softly, ‘Wotcher, nurses!’ Then others turned, smiled and jerked up thumbs and we smiled and jerked up ours in return. We were still talking to the police by the ropes when one by one the men drained their mugs, ducked under the ropes, and walked back up Ludgate Hill. The police asked if we had seen Piccadilly Circus. ‘One or two changes there.’
On our way back along Fleet Street an elderly woman wearing a dirty floral apron appeared in a doorway, folded her arms and nodded at us. ‘Seen St Paul’s, ducks? Didn’t get it, did he? Not for want of trying, either. Makes you think, don’t it?’
There were ropes around Piccadilly Circus, but again we were allowed through. Again there were still men working amongst the rubble, again black, jagged roofless buildings, again street craters. The men worked silently, carefully, in case a sudden sound, or too much force, brought down a wall or roof on those undiscovered and still buried alive. The silence accentuated the sounds; the steady clink of rubble being moved by hand, the chorus of smoke-induced coughs, the slow footsteps on pavements and the wooden planks laid across some of the craters. The slow footsteps belonged to the handful of other sightseers in service uniforms, probably, like ourselves, waiting for trains they hoped would be running later. Their expressions were as stunned as our own. All of us walked and gazed around as if sleepwalking.
We stopped on one wooden plank over a crater not yards from the front entrance of Swan and Edgar’s and looked down at the exposed morass of pipes, paving stones, and chunks of tarmac. Betty whispered, ‘I wonder if we’ll really believe we’ve actually done this later. This is Piccadilly Circus, Lucy.’
‘I know. I’m glad Daddy can’t see it.’
We moved on and I kept repeating those words in my mind, and then, absurdly, remembering the old London music hall songs Father always sang when shaving in the morning. Through my illness in 1938, I knew all the words of Any Old Iron, Boiled Beef And Carrots, My Old Man Said Follow The Van, Knocked ’Em In The Old Kent Road and others.
We heard no songs in London on that bleak, cold, charcoal-coloured afternoon. Everything and everyone reeked of smoke. Most of the faces were dirty and exhausted, and some were annoyed, some angry, and some, incredibly, cheerful. Everywhere were tatty little chalked or scribbled notices: ‘Open for business round the back – if you can find the back let me know. Signed. Prop.’ ‘Chestnuts roasted while you wait. Ta for the free heat Jerry!’ And variations on the words already (unknown to me) pasted on St Thomas’s collecting boxes, ‘Down but not out. Open for business as usual.’
Here and there a cheap, bedraggled little Union Jack fluttered from the top of a pile of rubble. And again and again, scrawled on walls, painted over battened shop windows and across blistered front doors, ‘London can take it’.
Slang when used in its right time has one advantage over good English since everyone of that time knows precisely what it means. Being of that time, on that afternoon of 30th December 1940, we knew those last four words contained neither false bravado nor arrogance, but merely a plain statement of fact.
Chapter Seven
It was only in 1941 that I properly appreciated how the war had my immediate generation by the throat, and this sensation of being trapped by circumstances was shared by millions of my fellow-civilians in uniform, whose lives were equally organized, steam-rollered, and for some ended, by invisible, all-powerful authority.
Every day in the papers were maps of North Africa decorated with arrows. One day the arrows pointed left, the next right, then left again, as the opposing armies in the desert swayed backwards and forwards with the restlessness of the sand. In the post, news of schoolfriends in the WAAF, WRNS, ATS and so many St Leonards boys in the armies overseas that not one in my home circle remained in the UK.
Sister Blood-and-Guts vanished to Africa. Betty back to St Leonards for a few months before joining the WAAF for the duration. In late January she heard through the International Red Cross that Tony had died in France in June 1940 and, being just clear of the conscripted age, she resigned from the VADs. A note dated: 2nd March 1941: ‘This morning I sewed on my first War Service stripe. It looks like an enormous D.F.C. ribbon worn high on the left sleeve and signifies that Andrews L. M., W/640714, BRCS, Sussex 14, has nursed the Army on active service for one year – actually it’s nearly thirteen months but like everything else in the Army my stripe was late in arriving.’
I had then been moved into a single billet in another private house. Through my new landlady I met G, a Flying Officer in the RAF and former newly qualified architect. I only knew him for seven weeks, but as he was the first man I loved and wanted to marry, I remembered those weeks for years. Those seven were the last weeks of G’s short life. He was twenty-seven when his aircraft was shot down somewhere off The Wash. It was never recovered.
Afterwards, I had from his best friend on the station the kind of letter received by thousands of other women from other men’s best friends in our war – and I imagine in all wars since men could write and women read.
‘… I am sorry to have to tell you this but I promised him I would let you know if anything like this happened. I’m afraid it will be a great shock and I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t know what else to say, but I’m very sorry …’
My landlady and Ollie, the only other person to whom I had talked of G in his lifetime, made me tea. Pot after pot of tea. I wondered numbly, as I was to wonder on other occasions of intense, personal grief, what had been the automatic English reaction to bereavement before tea was first introduced into England. Years had to pass before I dared wonder what might have happened in the life G and I had just begun to plan together, had our youth not chanced to coincide with a holocaust.
Eventually, Ollie asked, ‘What now? Try for a transfer?’
‘No. I’ve had standing still. I’ll train. The Army’ll let me out to do general. I’ll try for one of the London hospitals, only not B.-and-G.’s.’
‘When did you make up your mind?’
‘I dunno. Made itself up. All I’ve got to do now is fix on a hospital then see if it’ll take me. Do you know the form for applying?’
‘Not sure. Ask round in this new bunch of Sisters. Most look quite young and almost human.’
I took her advice. ‘What’s a goodtime girl like you want to train for – and don’t kid me you’re not having a good time with your looks! What’s that—? You really want to be a – oh, no! Sorry to laugh, Andrews, but it’s so funny – you – a writer! You can’t even spell! Remember asking me yesterday if “dose” had a “z”? Not to worry! You’ll get married and forget all about this nonsense before you’re much older!’
I never understood that reaction, and particularly not in the period following G.’s death when I felt as I imagined it felt to bleed internally. I overlooked the fact that I possessed both the tremendous physical resilience of healthy youth, and the kind of blank chocolate-box prettiness that can so often be an obstacle to the understanding of others, and much more often to other women than to men. That reaction left me confused, angry, and hurt.
One week a new senior Sister took temporary charge of my ward. She was a tallish, slender young woman with a cheerful smile who seemed so young that initially I thought her fresh from training-school. Then I heard from others that she had worked in battle zones and on a hospital ship that had been sunk.
In that week she transformed our working life by reducing floor-scrubbing to the necessary minimum and giving us classes in all slack periods. In one class she told us she had been a ward sister in her training hospital before the war. She did not name her hospital until one evening when she and I were alone in the ward kitchens and about to serve the patients’ suppers. The first course was soup. At the last moment I discovered our soup ladle was missing. I apologized and braced myself for the inevitable blast. Sister Blood-and-Guts, and others, would have blown me through the roof. The newcomer smiled, ‘Have to manage without.’ She helped herself to a one-pint china jug, removed her cuffs, pushed up her sleeves, dug the jug into the simmering white soup. ‘I dread to think what my Sister P.T.S. would say could she see me dishing up with my sleeves up.’
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